


got a girl in the war

by shellsinsand



Category: Naruto
Genre: Character Study, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-05
Updated: 2018-06-05
Packaged: 2019-05-18 14:46:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14854779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shellsinsand/pseuds/shellsinsand
Summary: a collection of thoughts on Kushina





	got a girl in the war

**Author's Note:**

> Look, I'm having a relapse into Naruto after nearly a decade of not being in this fandom. I am not proud. This is not beta-d. I did not sign up to still be having these kinds of feelings about these idiots. I'm refusing to reread canon, so this might be slightly AU. Proceed at your own risk.

**i.**  
She’s born screaming - nose scrunched and waving her fists in the air. Her mother laughs, holds her close. “You’ll go far with a voice like that, daughter-mine,” she says. There’s no way for her to know how right she is.

**ii.**  
She had two older brothers and enough cousins to crew even the biggest ships in the harbor. The Uzumaki clan is loud and loving and long lived - full of laughter. (It takes a certain kind of family to raise a daughter who is never afraid of reaching, stretching out her hand for something more.) They are sailors and shinobi and weavers and always in each other’s business. None of this will save them.

**iii.**  
There’re two blissful years between Kushina leaving for Konoha and her home being wiped off the map. They’re bright and syrupy in her mind - refusing to be forgotten. It would be kinder, maybe, if she couldn’t remember her parent’s letters or how bright Konoha had looked before she saw its failings, but it would be dishonest to say she regrets those sunshine years. 

**iv.**  
Her father tells her she will hold the Kyuubi when she’s five. All the children of Whirlpool grow up in a cradle of unstoppable forces, storms that cannot be controlled. Some weather them recklessly, some cautiously, but all of them learn they weather them best together. She does not think to be afraid.

**v.**  
Konoha is big the first time she sees it from her perch on her brother’s shoulders. She’s seven and they do not stop on their way to the small village where her great aunt lives. But father had let Niisan climb a tree to see Hokage Mountain - and she’d begged until he’d taken her with him. It’s enormous and she thinks: someday.

**vi.**  
There are words she will not speak after. There’s no one left to hear them.

**vii.**  
Kushina and the third Hokage maintain a frosty distance. (Konoha ninja arrived 36 hours after the slaughter of Whirlpool - intelligence arriving too late, resources stretched too thin, or communications ignored there’s never any confirmation. But there was only ever one narrative that was going to survive.)

**viii.**  
It takes almost three years for Minato to find out that Kushina can actually cook - for Kushina to let him find out. “My aunt taught me,” she says, timing it just so. He inhales rice, spluttering, and his eyes get so wide he looks like a fish. She laughs with her whole body, long and hard. She laughs until the tension in her shoulders shakes loose and she slumps against him. “It’s just,” she waves a chopstick, “sometimes I want to remember more than I want to forget.”

**ix.**  
She adopts people - loudly and lovingly, without the slightest hint of subtlety. Her heartbeat is a stubborn tattoo of a village that roared and a family who cared too well to have anything but an extra place at the table. Konoha ninja are known for their information gathering, but Kushina never gave Konoha anything more than she wanted to. She made it her home, but it did not get to claim her. It did not get to wash her clean.

**x.**  
Naruto is born blonde and Kushina’s heart breaks just a little (a final crack in an old scar). Her son will not know the sea or the wild joy of leaping off cliffs to the sound of the gulls, the water rising up to meet you. He will not look anything like his uncles. She presses her lips to his forehead, red and wrinkled. Naruto will be loud and loved and long lived. It will be enough.


End file.
